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Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School. Rebecca Zurier. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006. Pp. x + 407. $49.95 (cloth).
Cities are peculiarly suited to interdisciplinary analysis: people live cheek by jowl in urban space and so do ideas. The desire to represent the metropolis's intermingling cultural strains at the heart of many recent books on New York City, from Ann Douglas's vital Terrible Honesty (1995) to Christine Stansell's American Moderns (2000) to Douglas Tallack's New York Sights (2005). Rebecca Zurier joins this lively critical crowd with her study of the turn-of-the-century artists known as the Ashcan School. Earlier paintings of New York City were characterized distance, often impressionistic blurs or bird's-eye views that raised viewers above the fray Ashcan artists, by contrast aimed for a street-level realism. All newcomers to New York around the turn of the century, these painters interrogate the "public culture of looking" in various ways (51). Zurier moves from the portraits of Robert Henri (1865-1929) to the streetscapes Everett Shinn (1876-1953), from the vigorous caricatures of William Glackens (1870-1938), George Luks (1867-1933), and George Bellows (1882-1925) to the elliptical narratives of Sloan (1871-1951). All of these paintings, she argues, "address you as a fellow onlooker" with both the friendliness and the anonymity so central to city life.
Throughout Picturing the City, the scenes on Ashcan School canvases appear not as reified isolating sights, but as interventions in an ongoing dialogue on urban spectatorship. The book's first section, titled "The...